ADM+S Artist-Researchers Featured in 2024 Now or Never Festival
Author Natalie Campbell
Date 26 July 2024
ADM+S Associate Investigator Dr Joel Stern, ADM+S Affiliate Assoc Prof James Parker, and Machine Listening collaborator Dr Sean Dockray will showcase a new exhibition and performance in Melbourne as part of the upcoming 2024 Now or Never Festival.
On 31 August Machine Listening will perform a newly commissioned work titled Songbook (5-x), the first Australian iteration of a project premiered at Unsound 2023 in Krakow, with support from ADM+S.
The collective will present a suite of new songs exploring techniques of automatic reading, writing, recitation, composition, and decomposition as part of the Soft Centre Program at the Trades Hall Building in Carlton.
“The Machine Listening Songbook performance at Soft Centre is a chance for us to continue developing the work we began last year at Unsound in Krakow,” said Dr Stern.
“We want to think playfully and critically about what a ‘song’ might mean in the context of generative AI, platform economies and data capitalism. We’re interested in exploring how automated technologies around sound and music might be used in politically reflexive, subversive, contradictory and revealing ways.”
Established in 2020, Machine Listening is a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation, focused on the political and aesthetic dimensions of the computation of sound and speech.
Dr Stern and Dr Dockray have also curated ‘This Hideous Replica’, an experimental project featuring artworks, performances, screenings, workshops, a ‘replica school’ and other uncanny encounters to be exhibited at RMIT Gallery, Capitol Theatre, and other Melbourne venues.
The exhibition will be open from 22-31 August as part of the Now or Never program and will continue at RMIT Gallery until 16 November.
Lifting its title from a misheard line in a 1980 song by The Fall about a reclusive dog breeder whose ‘hideous replica’ haunts industrial Manchester, this experimental project adopts monstrous replication as a tactic, condition, and curatorial framework for exploring algorithmic culture, simultaneously alienating, seductive and out-of-control.
It features works by Debris Facility, Heath Franco & Matthew Griffin, Josh Citarella, Liang Luscombe, Mochu, Diego Ramírez, Masato Takasaka, Anna Vasof, Loren Adams and many more.
Dr Stern explains, “This Hideous Replica is an opportunity to bring together artists, writers, researchers, musicians and others to share ideas, methods and creative practices for dealing with a world that is increasingly bewildering and basically weird as it overflows with content, information, perspectives, and things.”
Registration for various exhibits in “This Hideous Replica” are now open:
- Mochu: Great Chain of Stains or Incompatible Rationalities on the Web reading group
1:00pm – 4:00pm, 28 Aug 2024, First Site Gallery
An unscripted conversation, watching-and-reading group with artist and writer Mochu exploring the possibilities and impossibilities of experimental writing after the internet. - Jennifer Walshe: 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art and Music workshop
11:00am – 1:00pm, 4 Sep 2024, First Site Gallery
“AI is not a singular phenomenon. We talk about it as if it’s a monolithic identity, but it’s many, many different things – the fantasy partner chatbot whispering sweet virtual nothings in our ears, the algorithm scanning our faces at passport control, the playlists we’re served when we can’t be bothered to pick an album. The technology is similar in each case, but the networks, the datasets and the outcomes are all different.” - A Hacker Manifesto at 20: A reading group with McKenzie Wark
2:00pm – 4:00pm, 4 Sep 2024, First Site Gallery
Writer, theorist, and raver McKenzie Wark leads a reading and discussion group on her influential text, A Hacker Manifesto, 20 years after its publication by Harvard University Press in 2004. - This Hideous Replica: McKenzie Wark and Jennifer Walshe at The Capitol
6:00pm – 8:00pm, 5 Sep 2024, the Capitol
McKenzie Wark: From Automatic to Automated Writing
A public lecture by writer and theorist McKenzie Wark rethinking historical avant-garde debates on the ‘conceit of the author’ through the prism of AI and generative text.
This Hideous Replica is produced by RMIT Culture with support from the ADM+S Centre, RMIT Design and Creative Practice Enabling Impact Platforms.
The Now or Never Festival celebrates creativity, inquiring minds, and exploration, with a focus on art, ideas, sound and technology.
The theme for the 2024 event is Look through the Image’, inviting audience members to interrogate what’s in front of them, explore deeper meanings, contemplate layers of symbolism and question reality from AI-generated narratives and visual distortion works to cinematic and augmented reality experiences.
